Pollux and Castor were sons of Leda, who was wife of the mortal king
Tyndareus and lover of Zeus, the chief god.
Again, there are brief fragments of Pylades,
Tyndareus, and Orestes pleading their cases, bur the major piece of testimony comes after John and Nod decide the only reason Orestes has a hearable case at all is because he killed his mother, not his father.
A similar contradictory effect is produced in Orestes when
Tyndareus criticises Orestes for not having prosecuted his mother for murdering his father (Or.
In order to help the students with this information, I gave a lecture on the causes of the Trojan war given in the mythological tradition: the Treaty of
Tyndareus, Judgment of Paris, marriage of Peleus to Thetis, etc.
According to the Greek myth,
Tyndareus, Helen's father, made her suitors promise to defend whomever she decided to marry if he were wronged.
The usual story of the war's origins is familiar, of course: the beauty contest among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite; Aphrodite's bestowal of the beautiful Helen on Paris as a reward for his judgment in her favor; his carrying off of Helen and of Menelaus' possessions to Troy; and the oaths of
Tyndareus that obliged Helen's former suitors to help Menelaus retrieve her and punish her abductor.
In Jan's Leda Shows her daughter Helen to
Tyndareus (1660; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) the theatrically exaggerated event is staged in an unattractive, obscure garden.
Because Helen is intent upon identifying with Olympus, rather than the backwater kingdom of Leda's husband King
Tyndareus, she needs to stress that no daughter of
Tyndareus's brother Icarius could really be her "cousin.
Helen was reared by a human father,
Tyndareus King of Sparta, with his own daughter, Clytemnestra;
Tyndareus also took his brother's sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, into his care after their father was murdered.
Helen opens upon a Helen who bewails her fate in an explanatory prologue: her introductory words tell the spectator where she is, in Egypt, and then who she is, the daughter of
Tyndareus.
After Atreus is murdered by his own nephew Aegisthus (son of Thyestes), Agamemnon and Menelaus take refuge with
Tyndareus, king of Sparta, whose daughters, Clytemnestra and Helen, they respectively marry.
In Greek mythology, twins sons of Leda and
Tyndareus or Zeus, called the Dioscuri.
